Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | June 2012 18 Feature surrounded by seas of mud and piles of dirt. “They never approached the project from the point of view of what would be attractive from the financing point of view,” the source said. “There is nothing to find money for because there’s no business plan. The model she put together is very rudimentary. It doesn’t really bear any relationship to reality.” He says he actually thought the project at one point had a lot of potential. It is, after all, situated in a good location, on a highway 20 minutes from a large city and regionally less than three hours by air from a number of major population centers: Hong Kong, Bangkok and Singapore. If developed properly, he argues, it could have been a worthwhile project. The source adds it should have been built in manageable stages over time. Most of all, it should have been planned without the promise of a casino. The mistake that many aspiring gaming entrepreneurs make is to believe and try to sell the idea that you can build first and then get the license, he says. This rarely works, and it is a particularly bad strategy in Vietnam. The country is very cautious about gaming. It only has three casinos in existence or in the works: the Do Son Casino in Hai Phong City; the Crowne International Casino in Da Nang City; and the MGM Ho Tram Casino in Vung Tau Province. New licenses, as the laws now stand, would only be granted to foreign investors bringing in more than US$4 billion and opening establishments restricting access to foreigners only. HappyLand probably would not have been able to qualify for a gaming license.More to thepoint, it’s unlikely thatmajor international investors would ever pour money into HappyLand in the hope that it could eventually get the proper gaming permissions. It really doesn’t muchmatter anymore whether HappyLandmade sense as a business or not, for events have overtaken the project. The local economy is falling apart as banks face bad debts and as a property bubble collapses. Even if HappyLand had been built to the right scale, it still may not have worked. “A number of projects in the area have failed. There’s lots of excess capacity,”says a banker in Vietnam not involved in HappyLand but acquainted with it. “Not a good project. They are trying to sell tracts of land and marketing that there will be a Disneyland next to it—a marketing ploy.” In the end and all told, the professional who was close to the project and knows it well is quite sympathetic toward Ms Thao, the chairwoman. He feels that some of the service providers may have taken advantage of her. They agreed to do the work and took the money, perhaps knowing full well that the project would never get off the ground. “I feel badly for her,” he said of Ms Thao. “She has been fleeced pretty thoroughly by people who knew exactly what they were doing.” Richard Meyer is a freelance journalist based in Bangkok, Thailand, and covers the Indochina markets for Inside Asian Gaming . Construction progress as of 25th May, 2012, from Khang Thong Group website Rendering of one of the planned attractions from the official HappyLand website